With the possible exception of L.K.Advani, Sardar Parkash Singh Badal is perhaps the most venerable political leader in the very crowded non-Congress crowd. Alarm bells should have rung when Badal saheb announced his decision to return his Padma Vibhushan Award in protest over the three controversial farm laws. But the potentates atop the Raisina Hills seem to have turned off their hearing aids.
No wonder, Sukhbir Badal felt constrained to raise his voice; he mocked the singers of the “tukde-tukde gang” national hymn for painting the protesting farmers in the “Khalistani” colours. The president of the Akali Dal blasphemously points out that after demonising the Muslims, the “tukde-tukde” singers were now questioning the patriotism of the Sikhs, simply because they have strong doubts about the so-called ‘Ambani-Adani Acts’.
As the year comes to a close, two of the oldest partners in the National Democratic Alliance (NDA) stand separated from the Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP). The Akali Dal’s disenchantment with Narendra Modi’s BJP is even more significant than that of the Shiv Sena. Uddhav Thackarey walked out of the NDA in Maharashtra over what he thought was the BJP’s bad faith; the Badals feel that Modi’s BJP was striking at the very core of their constituency, the Jat peasantries.
The Akali Dal-the BJP political entente was hugely significant in the context of the rupture between the Indian state and the Sikh community after the Operation Blue Star. The BJP leadership’s unwillingness to satisfy and accommodate the Shiv Sena and the Akali Dal represents a qualitatively different – and, perhaps, an inevitable – turn in the life of the NDA.
As a political contraption, the NDA was anchored in a wise understanding: the principal task of statecraft in this vast land of baffling diversities will always be to generate and sustain political harmony, and, even if there was to be some kind of ordered conformity, prudence demanded that it must be dressed up as a respectful partnership between the Imperial New Delhi and those on the periphery and the margin.
This was nothing particularly insightful to this working stratagem; it was simply an unsentimental reiteration of the painful lessons learnt by the Congress party as it struggled to steer the disorderly post-independent polity towards stability and consolidation of the new Indian state. The Congress party refashioned itself as an efficacious political instrument of the Indian state; consequently, when the Congress began faltering, other experiments had to be conducted in producing pan-India sentiments of togetherness and cohesion. The first edition, the United Front, did not last long; there was a vacuum which needed to be filled – and the NDA had to be invented in 1998.
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And, as Advani recalls in his memoirs, My Country, My Life, the then BJP leadership – Atal Bihari Vajpayee, Advani, Bhairon Singh Shekhawat, Murli Manohar Joshi, Jaswant Singh – had to take a “major strategic decision” before the NDA could come about. The BJP had to agree not to insist on three contentious commitments it had made in its 1998 manifesto: the construction of a temple in Ayodhya; enactment of a uniform civil code; and repeal of Article 370. It was an arrangement dyed in the colours of inclusiveness and accommodation. It was a wise as well as an expedient partnership because the BJP, as the principal anchor, simply did not have the numbers in the parliament to corral regional parties and players at gunpoint.
In 1998, the BJP leadership – and, its guardians in Nagpur – knew that the saffron party needed to ride over a steep hill of political untouchability. Compromise and concession became operating axioms. The convenorship of the NDA was conceded to the remarkably unfussy but tactically useful George Fernandes; and it was readily conceded that the Telugu Desam Party of Chandrababu Naidu could support a Vajpayee government from the outside.
The BJP leadership shrewdly used the NDA platform to project itself as a different – and better – breed of ‘dedicated’ men and women who would steer the Indian state more efficiently, more purposefully and more reasonably than the Congress had done all these years. The new middle classes, those children of the post-1991 ‘liberalised’, had to be reassured that the BJP in power would not rock the boat and unleash chaos of the December 1992 vintage.
In effect, this NDA bore the imprint of Vajpayee and his Nehruvian temperament. A wise Old Man of Old India. For Vajpayee and his comrades in the Jan Sangh/BJP, the pain of the Partition was still raw, and the travails of a nascent nation-state struggling to stay afloat was not a distant memory; all that has changed. Today, the BJP is in the thrall of a new leadership that is untouched and uninformed by the Old India. It has a majority of its own in the Lok Sabha and is on the verge of securing a majority in the Rajya Sabha. It no longer needs demanding and difficult allies.
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The BJP may still find the NDA to be a useful device, if only to keep the stray groups and parties from teaming up with the other side. But the NDA today sustains itself only on terms dictated by the Narendra Modi-Amit Shah duo. The concept of a political arrangement like the NDA carries with it a suggestion of federalism, partnership, accommodation and validity of regional aspirations and ambitions. This is against the very grain of the new overlords atop the Raisina Hill.
The BJP, under Modi, is in the thrall of a muscular nationalism – with it a pronounced accent on extracting conformity, demanding obedience, insisting on submission on the pain of intimidation and coercion. This shift towards ‘nationalist’ overdose suits the National Security State, which even otherwise demands centralisation and has indeed become very adept at rigging the political discourse in favour of ‘nationalist’ themes and slogans.
In ideological terms, the concept of an NDA is in conflict with the visions of a glorious Hindu India. This vision of a kind of ‘Hindufication’ denies, ipso facto, authenticity of ‘local’ sentiment and regional ambitions. In political terms, the BJP has deeply internalised – notwithstanding those self-proclaimed moral guardians in Nagpur – a personality overload.
This overload has produced its own inevitable unreasonableness. An imperial arrogance has worked its charm over the political crowd. Every nook and corner of India must submit itself to the whims and fancies of the imperial throne. Who needs a cumbersome NDA?
Harish Khare is a journalist who lives and works in Delhi.